But the talking point of the shows, post-runway dinners and cocktail soirees in Paris this past week has been the open war between two sartorial species: the young fashion bloggers, or ‘‘peacocks’’, who hang around outside the shows and are ‘‘famous for being famous’’, versus self-styled catwalk ‘‘crows’’ such as the International Herald Tribune’s veteran fashion editor Suzy Menkes.

‘‘They pose and preen, in their multi-patterned dresses, spidery legs balanced on club-sandwich platform shoes,’’ moaned Menkes in her revealing personal essay ‘‘The Circus of Fashion’’, written for The New York Times T magazine.

‘‘The fuss around the shows now seems as important as what goes on inside the carefully guarded tents … You can hardly get up the steps at Lincoln Centre, in New York, or walk along the Tuileries Garden path in Paris because of all the photographers snapping at the poseurs. Cameras point as wildly at their prey as those original paparazzi in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. But now subjects are ready and willing to be objects, not so much hunted down by the paparazzi as gagging for their attention.’’

By bagging the upstart bloggers big-time, and almost as elegantly as Tom Wolfe did in Radical Chic, his brilliant 1970 new journalism essay skewering the pretensions of the trendy Manhattan left-wing crowd, La Menkes has created a perfect multi-platform, social-media storm.

Just Google the reaction from street-style authorities with blogs, such as Leandra ‘‘Manrepeller.com’’ Medine and Style Bubble’s Susanna Lau – both featured last weekend in these pages under the headline “They’ve Got The Look?" – as well as the lesser known of the hydra-headed digital commentariat. One blogger on fashionologie.com, Justin Fenner, called it ‘‘Word Wars’’.

Of course Menkes, still instantly recognisable with her fabled ska-style quiff, has been covering the shows since before most of these fashion victims were born.

The recipient of a French Légion d’Honneur for her services to la mode, who yearns for the good old 1980s when fashionistas dressed for each other, not for thousands or millions of virtual followers, Menkes has paradoxically proven that old media can still get the world talking.

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The response to her essay was so enormous that the International Herald Tribune put out a press statement on the brouhaha.

Menkes, who can now be assured she won’t be heading for forced retirement any time soon, had ‘‘sparked debate about ethics in fashion journalism’’ on Twitter and in the fashion world.

Well, there’s an understatement.

Bloggers are highly sensitive to the suggestion that they, like many magazine editors, are ‘‘bought’’ by their sponsors, constantly product placing and endorsing without declaring their interests.

On the other hand, as Candice Lake, a former Australian model turned Vogue photographer who has been known to write the odd blog, asked: what is so wrong with these people being such good entrepreneurs that their blogs actually make them a decent living?

Perhaps Menkes, the grande dame of fashion journalism who is still paid well enough to maintain her principles of fair and independent criticism – she does not accept ‘‘gifts’’ in any form – has been overtaken by a world ruled by smartphones, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram.

For Eva Galambos, owner of Parlour X boutique in Sydney’s Paddington, Menkes and her peers need to “work hard to remain relevant, like the rest of us, and move forward with progress in technology and communications’’.

“It is not enough to rest on one’s prior achievements in a world that is changing so fast,’’ she says.

Menkes has more than 6000 “likes" on Facebook, but the new breed have many more followers online than she has print readers.

‘‘This is my generation, my vocation, my moment that she is reprimanding," explains Man Repeller’s Medine in a widely shared rebuttal, “Blog is a Dirty Word".

‘‘There is a reason, after all, that Gen Y – which is only becoming more important as we get older and begin pushing and stimulating our economy – has been dubbed the entrepreneurial generation.

‘‘Many of us couldn’t land the jobs we wanted, so we just made our own. Sure, the training isn’t traditional but my generation is brilliant; we are over-educated and often over-qualified for the jobs that we do take.

‘‘Tradition and innovation have little to do with one another and in the battle of success and relevance between the former and latter, the latter has proven itself victorious."

Is that the sound of the late Diana Vreeland, legendary fashion editor at American Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and subject of a new biography Diana Vreeland: Empress of Fashion by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, throwing something ?

There is of course no stopping the surge towards social media-driven consumer ‘‘journalism’’.

With flagship magazine Elle, France retains an intellectual and feminist edge under long-serving editor Valerie Toranian, but the Australian edition will have an entirely different kind of editor.

As revealed in this paper’s Rear Window column this week, Bauer Media has just appointed Justine Cullen, former editor of Shop Til You Drop magazine, for what is deemed to be one of the toughest jobs in the tough Australian media market.

Magazine editors are obliged to keep an aura of objectivity but bloggers on the receiving end of free trips, clothes, jewellery, make-up, products and runway tickets are frankly unlikely to critique fearlessly a collection that stinks.

But haven’t we reached the limit of the wearying boosterism of forums like Twitter, which suffer from what Jacob Silverman writing in Slate dubbed an “epidemic of niceness"?

Evidently, plenty of designers prefer it this way. Cathy Horyn, the New York Times fashion writer, was banned from the front row by designer Hedi Slimane after she dared question the brilliance of the new artistic director at Saint Laurent in his first collection last year.

No doubt her place was swiftly taken by a blogger gushing over his shocking, grungy Courtney Love- inspired collection of babydoll dresses, greasy hair and duffle coats for the once classy Paris label launched by Yves of YSL, now deleted from his own brand.